The customer quote in this roundup by Phil Wainewright just screamed at me:
Ben Moreland, manager of application infrastructure delivery for insurance and financial services group The Hartford, makes a telling comment at the end of a Network World article about SOA adopters:
“One of the comments we make to vendors in this SOA world is, ‘the easier it is to replace you, the more we like you‘. We want to have a lot of flexibility to pull in a new vendor without having a major 18-month application rework.”
There is a lesson in there for Microsoft and others. Service orientation means mapping to a set of decoupled services that the market defines, not delivering monolithic platforms. Stephen has been tussling with similar issues of service definition recently.
I am with Ben- and the counterintuitive argument that success comes in not locking in customers, rather than the other way around. That way commoditization lies? Just so–if you’re a tech vendor, deal with it…
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